Climb every mountain —

macOS 10.13 High Sierra: The Ars Technica review

A focus on foundation makes for an important but nigh-invisible update.

Grab bag

Open the Compose window in Mail while in full-screen mode, and it will automatically pop up in Split View mode.

Andrew Cunningham

You can take Live Photos if you're on a FaceTime call with anyone using iOS 11 or High Sierra. Both people will be notified when either one takes a Live Photo.

Andrew Cunningham

You can disable Live Photos in the FaceTime settings.

Andrew Cunningham

The eficheck tool.

Andrew Cunningham

Finally, as we do every year, there’s a big pile of little things scattered throughout macOS that are significant enough to mention but small enough (or self-explanatory enough) that they don’t merit deeper exploration or explanation. Welcome to the Grab Bag!

Mail

When you’re using Mail in full-screen mode and go to compose a new message, the compose window automatically pops up beside the main window in Split View mode; in Sierra, the compose window obscures the main window and needs to be minimized and maximized if you want to look at different things, à la iOS.

Apple also says that High Sierra compresses Mail messages, resulting in “up to 35 percent” space reduction; obviously your results will vary based on the size of your mailbox and the type of messages and attachments you’re getting.

FaceTime Live Photos

If you’re in a FaceTime call with someone else running iOS 11 or High Sierra, tap the circular photo button to snap a Live Photo. You’ll be alerted if the person on the other end of the call takes a Live Photo, and you can stop people from doing it by turning Live Photos off in the FaceTime settings.

You still don’t get full-screen Messages effects

I don’t know if there are Mac users out there who truly feel like they’re missing out on iMessage apps since so many of them are a bit silly and inessential, but looking at “sent with Echo” or “sent with Balloons” continues to be a reminder that you’re using a second-class version of the service.

No more AIM in Messages

The Messages client still works fine with Jabber IM accounts, but support for AOL Instant Messenger and Bonjour has been removed. It's too bad if you like to use Messages as a unified, all-encompassing chat client, but there's always Adium.

EFI check

A new security tool called “eficheck” that ships with High Sierra runs a weekly under-the-hood checkup, checking your system firmware against a list of “known good” firmware and making sure it hasn’t been modified. Most Mac users will never see any evidence that it’s running or doing anything. If the tool does detect something fishy, you’ll see a nondescript warning dialog asking you to send a report to Apple, which may help the company diagnose the problem and come up with a fix (in a series of deleted tweets, one of the tool’s creatorsencouraged users to do this if you ever see the popup, but specifically told Hackintosh users not to bother).

Recommendations: Look before you leap

It’s difficult to recommend against an iOS update, because to get new security updates (which you should) you need to accept all the UI changes and feature updates. But the most urgent security fixes for High Sierra will be distributed to Sierra and El Capitan, too—you’ve got some flexibility.

I’ve been using High Sierra for months, and I’ll continue to use it. I think the vast majority of people who decide to upgrade on day one will be essentially fine. But if it’s at all possible for you, you should wait for version 10.13.1 or 10.13.2 to update to High Sierra.

Aside from the fact that you’ll keep getting security (and Safari) updates in Sierra, I make this recommendation for three reasons:

The number of user-facing improvements is small. The Photos app gets the biggest overhaul, and it’s a good one, but otherwise you’re not missing very much.

Some things just aren’t done. APFS won’t work on Fusion Drives. External graphics support is usable but not finished. iMessage on iCloud isn’t here yet. The new Metal-powered windowserver is still intermittently buggy.

Even with fully finished, bug-free features, Apple has been clear that these are foundational updates. Meaning: cool, user-visible stuff will be built on top of them in future releases, but that stuff isn’t here yet.

High Sierra’s first major update should hit in October-ish, around the same time as iOS 11.1 and the iPhone X; 10.13.2 should hit before the end of the year. I don’t know what those updates will include, but they usually squash the worst of the bugs and solve problems people inevitably run into while upgrading.

If you upgrade, make sure you have good backups and make sure you’re OK with doing a clean-install if anything goes bad. But assuming you’re still running El Capitan or Sierra and you’re happy with how your system is running right now, this year in particular is a good one to sit back and let other people work out the bugs before you dive in.

Conclusions: The stage is set

Further Reading

I’ve written and deleted and rewritten this section of the review twice now, because despite using it for months and diving deeper into it than most people will bother to, I’m still not sure what to think of High Sierra.

On the other hand, look at iOS. Has there been a year, ever, where iOS took a year off to focus on foundational technologies, leaving the rest of the UI and the vast majority of the apps mostly untouched? No. iOS 11 gets just as many foundational tweaks as High Sierra, but it also: added things to most of the major first-party apps; completely rethought the iPad multitasking model; overhauled the Control Center, Notification Center, and lock screen; launched a whole new augmented reality platform; and swept away the last remnants of 32-bit support from the iOS codebase. iOS switched to APFS in a mid-year point update. The rate of change—largely beneficial change, not just change for change’s sake—doesn’t even compare. It doesn’t help that High Sierra also feels like it’s in catch-up mode—external graphics and VR are both things that other platforms have supported for years, and a proper replacement for HFS+ has been due for at least a decade.

Of course, Apple is going to devote more resources to the operating system that represents 70 percent of its business, and, of course, adding improvements to a mature, complex, 16-year-old desktop operating system that grew from 28-year-old roots is more difficult and time-consuming than adding stuff to a phone OS that came out barely a decade ago and is still stretching its legs. But post-Yosemite updates have all felt quiet and incremental and small and safe, and I’d really like to see something that isn’t just a slightly improved version of a thing I already have.

Ultimately I think we’ll judge High Sierra based on what comes after it. To throw out some building metaphors: it’s really hard to judge what a building is going to look like if you can only see the foundation. I hope the work Apple has done here helps it tackle some of the Mac’s biggest long-term issues: Apple’s own first-party apps and services, most notably Messages and Siri, are still less capable on the Mac than they are on Apple’s other platform, despite sharing most of the same core technology. And the Mac App Store is still less healthy and vibrant than the iOS App Store. At this point, the iOS, watchOS, and tvOS stores are all interlinked, and macOS is out in the cold.

High Sierra is by no means a bad update—at least, it won’t be after the bugs are ironed out and the features are finished—but it’s also invisible by design. High Sierra’s new filesystem and APIs provide the Mac with a stronger foundation than ever, and the slowly approaching death of 32-bit apps suggests that Apple wants to rip out some of the operating system’s legacy cruft. And all my hardware complaints from last year’s review have been totally wiped out by not one but two MacBook Pro updates, a MacBook refresh, revamped Thunderbolt 3 iMacs, a peek at an iMac Pro that looks ridiculously powerful (and expensive), and the promise of a new Mac Pro tower to come. The stage has been set for a big, re-thought, flashy, forward-looking version of macOS. I hope we get it soon.

Promoted Comments

One small thing that will go unnoticed by single users or small organizations but could potentially be a bigger deal for large organizations is a change in fdesetup.

fdesetup is the tool used to enable/disable/modify FileVault on macOS and is leveraged via command line of scripting when you want to make changes. One of the methods fdesetup is used is to create a plist with information containing a currently authorized user in FileVault to add a new or out of sync user to FileVault like so:

fdesetup add -inputplist < some-xml-list.plist

On HFS+ this behaves as normal. But if the device is formatted with APFS it no longer works. Hopefully this is a bug that will be corrected in the final (or future) release, but in my testing with the GM it breaks workflow for automating FileVault.

Just went to the App store to download. Sorry if this is a dumb question, but how do I download all of High Sierra without installing right now? That is, when I clicked on it, instead of getting 5GB of installer, I got a 20 MB web install. I don't recall OS X installers functioning this way in previous releases.

I get the same thing (a 19.9 MB installer). I searched around the 'net for an answer and it appears that you can only download the full installer if you've already installed High Sierra.

That is, once you have it, then you can re-download it. As you said, this is different from the way that it used to work. Hopefully, somebody will come up with a way to get the full installer.

Share this story

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites